Wednesday, June 29, 2016

An FB friend of mine skeptical that Brexit will have much of a negative economic impact has put up a post entitled "Brexit-Schmexit!" To this I say, "Details-Schmetails!" because the widely varying possible impacts of details of that exit have induced a massive increase in uncertainty over the future around much of the world that itself can cause considerable economic harm. Just for the US alone, Jim Hamilton at Econbrowser documents the sharpest increase in measured policy uncertainty since the debt ceiling crisis of 2013 (also linked to by Mark Thoma at Economists View), and this is the leading complaint by most EU leaders against the plan by David Cameron (and Boris Johnson too apparently, as well as many in the UK hoping for an eventual Remain outcome) to delay invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty that would trigger the two year divorce negotiations, even as I sympathize with those in the UK hoping such a delay might lead to no Brexit at all in the end. The Europeans want the negotiations to start sooner so as to end the uncertainty sooner, which they see as hanging over the heads of their economies and damaging them, which seems a fair point.

Circumstantially, yesterday Marina and I led some students to visit the European Commission and the European parliament in Brussels. At the Commission last night, the Council of Europe heard David Cameron say good-bye and how much he loved Europe, even as he declared that he would not invoke Article 50 and would not leave office until at least October. Other EU leaders rejected this and called for immediate invocation of Article 50 to minimize uncertainty, including Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Francois Hollande, and Italy's Matteo Renzi. We visited the plenary hall of the parliament a few hours after a contentious debate in which one member denounced pro-Brexit Nicholas Farage as engaging in "Nazi propaganda," while Farange declared that his critics had "never held a real job in their lives." We heard speakers defending these institutions, but it became clear that details matter.

Something that struck me that EU critics would note is the massive ponderousness of the complex of buildings in this "Europe City" zone. Although Tyler Cowen recently compared them, they put to shame the structures in the zone in Washington that houses the headquarters of the Fed, World Bank, and IMF. A full 50,000 Eurocrats work in them, with it not at all clear that many or most of those are doing all that much useful. But then again, details matter. Much of what these folks do is related to the much hated regulations that the EU promulgates in its single market, with pro-Brexit campaigners declaring drag Britain down. How awful are these regulations? This is not clear.

Some are for environmental quality; some are for safety; ome are posed as unifying standards. Some of this may be useful, but some may not. Our speaker at the commission spoke about how the EC is cleaning up its act and doing better with standards. An example had to do with safety in relation to cosmetics. At one point there were sixteen different sets of standards relating to different cosmetics, running to 25,000 pages. More recently there has been an effort to simplify this and the sixteen have been reduced to one, with the number of pages involved down to 500. Is all this worth it? I do not know, although I do know that there have been safety issues regarding cosmetics and that this is s pretty big industry in the EU.

An especially controversial one involving the UK has involved fisheries policy. One of the more dramatic moments in the Brexit campaign in Britain in the last weeks involved a flotilla of fishers floating up the Thames in London calling for Brexit, with a competing flotilla led by Bob Geldof contesting them, with near violence breaking out between the two. Some of the fishers spokesmen were especially vehement about their alleged suffering at the hands of the EU regulaters, but this is far from obvious. That it is taken seriously shows up in that a major fishing area, Cornwall, voted strongly to leave, even as it is one of the parts of UK receiving the most amount of regional development aid due to its great poverty. They are getting lots of aid from the EU, but there has been no love there for it, given their attitude towards the fisheries policy.

So mostly they do not like quotas and other limits put on when and where and how much they can fish. But the hard fact is that open access renewable resource markets are subject to over-harvesting and collapse, with fisheries around the word most subject to this. Iceland has fought "cod wars" with British fishers invading their territorial waters. The British contest mostly with the Spanish fishers in the EU and feel that others are getting into waters they should control. There is no simple answer to this, but in fact there is strong evidence based on rising incomes for fishers, albeit smaller numbers of them, that the quotas and limits imposed by the EU have helped to preserve and even revive damaged fisheries that the British fishers use. Brexit may well lead to them being worse off, much worse off, even as they believe otherwise. This may well be how it will turn out for quite a few in UK.

In any case, whether declining foreign direct investment tanking the UK economy has a greater impact than some gain in reduced import competition and rising exports due to a devaluing pound, it looks from most in the EU that the greatest damage to their economies and the British one, as well as others around the world, will arise from the uncertainty associated with how all this will work itself out and how long it will take. In this regard I agree with the Europeans: whether or not the Brexit vote by the British was wise or not, they must minimize the damage of it to the rest of the world and get out ASAP to reduce all this world-economy-wrecking uncertainty.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

A standard argument from the left runs like this: in principle there are three positions a country like Britain could take toward the EU, opposition/exit, support/remain, and transform. But transforming the EU is not on the table, so the choice comes down to whether a country should remain part of the existing EU with all its faults or leave it. This is a lousy pair of options, and the debate between them can’t help but be muddled and unproductive.

The interesting question for me is why the EU is such a determined enforcer of neoliberalism and so resistant to fundamental reform. I asked this on Crooked Timber yesterday, and one of the commenters (thanks!) sent me to Gerassimos Moschonas, the Greek political scientist. I haven’t read his book In the Name of Social Democracy: The Great Transformation, 1945 to the Present yet (what’s taking me so long?), but I did take a look at this article, which was published in 2009 after the first edition of In the Name and seems to summarize his position.

Moschonas is very insightful about the structural constraints on anti-neoliberal (or genuinely social democratic) politics in Europe. The EU obstructs transformative political projects at the national level; meanwhile it prevents party formation and radical political action at the supranational level. This structure, which institutionalizes the deregulation of national economies in the name of the single market and imposes anti-Keynesian policies through the Stability and Growth Pact, is intrinsically resistant to change. Moreover, it coincides with a grand coalition at the EU level whose political ideology is resolutely neoliberal. Some of this is obvious to anyone who follows events, but Moschonas’ analysis of the structural aspect of “embedded neoliberalism” (my term) is enlightening.

But there is a hole in his narrative. Somehow, during the crucial period from the mid-80s to the early 90s, this neoliberal consensus in Europe was forged, and its project was the creation of exactly those structures that Moschonas studies. How could it be that, in a Europe that lacked explicit political organization at the confederal level, such a coalition, powerful enough to create entirely new institutions, could be assembled? Here structural political analysis of the sort represented by Moschonas is useful for posing the problem but doesn’t give us the resources to begin to answer it.

I think the missing dimension is political economy. Politics does not occur in a vacuum, with ideas competing on the basis of pure logic or emotional resonance. Political economy proposes a larger terrain, in which wealth and material interests generally condition politics and make particular ideas or projects more “realistic” or attainable. I’ll be the first to admit, however, that political economists have relied primarily on indirect evidence—historical or geographical correspondences between economic motives and political outcomes—and have been mostly unsuccessful in tracing the actual processes through which they occur. Understanding them is important not only in a general intellectual sense, but also, especially, for coming up with counter-hegemonic political projects.

I see this difficulty, for instance, in Varoufakis’ DiEM25 project to democratize the EU. He has in mind a two-step process: first the political structures are changed to enable a Europe-wide political space, and then that space can used to combat neoliberal hegemony. I’m not against this, but it seems to me that the first step presupposes the second: the existing structures exist precisely because of that hegemony, and it will have to be challenged in order to create new ones. It would be interesting to get Moschonas’ reaction to DiEM25.

In any case, DiEM25 was not on the ballot in Britain. You could vote to be part of the actually existing EU or vote to leave it. Like I say, lousy choice.

I hope you are paying close attention to what is happening in the British Labour Party.

If Bernie Sanders had somehow managed to win the Democratic Party nomination for President, the anti-Corbyn coup is exactly the kind of behavior you would have seen from the Democratic Party establishment.

Sabotage. During the election campaign.

The same pundits who now demand that Sanders immediately endorse Hillary Clinton in the name of party unity would walk away in disgust from a Sanders nomination, declining to get involved with a campaign so "out of touch" with the American electorate, a foregone conclusion that would be rerun incessantly in the liberal media.

Pillorying Hilary Benn: "Chat Shit Get Sacked"

Meanwhile, in a Sanders-nominated universe, Donald Trump would be profiled on TV as the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with -- a straight-talking tycoon who says outlandish things but whose frenzy will be tamed once he is anaesthetized by the trappings of office.

The establishment does not find losing amusing. But when they do have to lose, they would much prefer losing to a megalomaniac than to a movement. Megalomaniacs can be flattered and manipulated more predictably. Or so the professional courtiers believe. Whether this is true or not is doubtful. But then a lot of what courtiers believe is based on abject conformism, not observation and reflection.

I remember waking up in a sweat one night in late June or early July of 1972 with the realization that "they" would not let "it" happen. Exactly who they was wasn't clear -- the military? the Republicans? the Democratic Party establishment? Or what -- the nomination? an election?

And they didn't let it happen. But of course it was all the fault of McGovern and his supporters, just as the Leave vote in European Union referendum was all the fault of Jeremy Corbyn and Trump's election will be all the fault of Bernie Sanders and the Bros.

Monday, June 27, 2016

per capital GDP in Iceland is around 2.0 percent higher now than its pre-recession peak. That is a very different story. In fairness, the NYT piece refers to gross national income (GNI), not gross domestic product.

Dean argues that GDP is preferred over GNI but why if the citizens of a nation enjoy significant net income from abroad. Dean adds:

GDP is usually the preferred measure, but it can be inflated by things like foreign companies claiming profits in the country for tax purposes, as happens in Ireland. If the NYT's GNI numbers are correct, it is most likely due to foreign profits of Iceland's major banks in the bubble years before the crisis. It's not clear that the loss of these profits, which were based on speculation and fraud, is a negative for Iceland's economy.

Actually this represents two stories. Is it the bank speculation tale only? Or how much of this difference is due to transfer pricing manipulation? Ireland is known for its tax haven status with lots of multinationals shifting income there, which is why its reported GDP in 2013 on a PPP basis was almost 30% greater than its reported GNP in 2013 on the same basis. Iceland’s reported GDP in 2013 on a PPP basis was 15% higher than its reported GNP in 2013 on the same basis. While there is not much discussion of Iceland being a tax haven or transfer pricing with respect to this nation, it is interesting that its corporate tax rate is only 20%.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

At one level this is a trivial question with an easy answer. A British person is a citizen of Great Britain, whose more formal and official name is the United Kingdom, or UK for short. That should be the end of that, and the recent vote vote by citizens of Great Britain (I think permanent residents may also have been allowed to vote) to leave the European Union, the "e," arguably reinforced the meaningfulness of this identity, especially in regard to the broader alternative of being a "European."

But then we have this problem that this vote appears to be stirring up divisions within these British people, with the Scottish in particular having voted strongly against the majority outcome, resulting in renewed pressure to have another referendum on Scottish independence, for them to cease to be citizens of Great Britain, arguably to cease to be "British." Is this identity then much more fragile than we might think it is? This gets pushed further in that people in Northern Ireland also voted to Remain, although not by as large a margin as did the Scots, 56% rather than 62%. The Welsh went with the national majority, indeed mirroring it closely at 52%, with the English making that the national average by more strongly supporting Leave and offsetting the Remain majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland, with this even more strongly the case in more rural parts of England as London went strongly for Remain, almost as strongly as did Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland. There seem to be some pretty sharp divisions on this among the main identifiable sub-groups among the British.

This then suggests that we should take this internal division and apparent lack of agreed upon identity a bit more seriously. The word "British" comes from the word "Britain," which while often used as a short hand name for the entire nation, the United Kingdom, more specifically means the island of Britain, large island to the east of the island of Ireland. That the UK is "Great" Britain is partly because it involves more than just the people on that island, most notably the Northern Irish, as well as those on other much smaller islands such as Lewis (birthplace of Donald Trump's mother) where Scottish Gaelic is still spoken, and the Isle of Man, where the now-extinct language of Manx was spoken, related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic (and where the cats without tails come from),among some others. Thus being a British citizen includes people not living on the island of Britain.

The name "Britain" itself is quite old, going back to at least the Roman period, when those living on the island, or at least in the part of it ruled by the Romans, were known as the "Brythons." However, that proves to have involved a narrower group than those who live there now, not including the people now in Scotland who were called the "Picts" by the Romans, although they never viewed themselves as a group and identified themselves by tribal group names constituting sub-groups of themselves. That Scotland itself is sub-divided is clear in the division between the Highlands, where one is more likely to find people who can speak Gaelic, the language of people who invaded from Ireland several centuries after the Romans stopped ruling in the southern part of the island of Britain, the Romans having built Hadrian's Wall to protect the zone they ruled and full of Brythons largely to keep out the troublesome Picts, who reportedly painted themselves blue. Modern Scots are descended from ancient Pictish tribes, but also with this Irish Gaelic ancestry in the Highlands, as well as Viking ancestry, and Anglian ancestry in the Lowlands (Lowland Scottish fishermen reportedly can communicate easily with Frisian ones from the Netherlands, the Frisian language supposedly close to Old English). Yes, the Lowland Scots have serious English ancestry.

As for those original British, the "Brythons" who were ruled by the Romans, they lived in what is now England. But the language that the spoke was an ancestor to the modern Welsh language. Perhaps this is why the vote totals in Wales on Brexit so closely corresponded to the overall totals in Great Britain as a whole. However, clearly the modern Welsh are distinct from the Scottish, the Northern Irish (or "Scotch-Irish" as they are called in the US), not to mention the modern English. After all, Welsh is a Celtic language, if one more closely related to Breton spoken in northwestern France, as well as the now dead Cornish language, once spoken in Cornwall in the very southwestern most part of modern England, than to the Gaelic languages that came out of the island of Ireland. These modern Welsh are not all that closely related to the modern English, who now occupy the territory once occupied by the Roman-ruled Brythons, ancestors of the modern Welsh.

As it is, English not a Celtic language, although having many Celtic loan words in it,but mostly a Germanic one, related to modern Frisian as noted above, although also now with many loan words from Latin languages as a result of the Norman Conquest in 1066 and all that. The Germanic Anglo-Saxons (who also included the Jutes from Denmark who mostly ended up in Kent in the southeastern most part of England) invaded the island of Britain around and especially after the removal of Roman rule of what is now England and Wales, pushing the Celtic-speaking Welsh westwards into modern Wales, although also certainly killing many of them and intermarrying with some of their women to create the modern English. We indeed have some complicated migrations and wars that lie behind the identities of the main modern groups that inhabit both the island of Britain as well as the nation of Great Britain, not getting into all the groups that have arrived more recently ranging from Jews from Central Europe through Hindus from India and Muslims from Pakistan to Polish plumbers especially recently under the auspices of the European Union, from which the English in particular seem so keen on leaving, much more so than their fellow "British" in the Celtic fringe.

So we have it that the modern British are a bunch of sub-groups, ones that do not intermarry or mingle all that much, except maybe in London and a few other large cities. At some deeper level there really are not many "British" in Great Britain in the sense of people who are the descendants of fully intermarried members of these older constituent sub-groups who are very much aware of their identities, with this awareness if anything being heightened by their different attitudes towards this Brexit vote. This vote has if anything undermined what it means to be "British," even as it supposedly reinforces it. Indeed, quite a few observers are noting that this vote was really about the English asserting themselves, with those rural parts especially in the north and east often called "Little England" being the most strongly pro-Brexit parts of Great Britain of all.

While I have not seen anybody doing so, I am going to raise the question then about if there is a place where this intermingling of these different sub-groups has happened, where indeed we might find people who might represent this type that does not, or only barely does so in Great Britain itself. I think there is. It is the United States of Ameica, although also probably to a lesser degree in some of the other former English-speaking colonies of Great Britain, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South Africa. However, in the US, this is not immediately obvious, and this is partly because most of these people are certainly not called "British" or even "British-Americans," but something else. They are called WASPs, or "White Anglo_Saxon Protestants," and I am one of them by ancestry, or so a sociologist who would use this term would argue.

There is a problem, however, with this label, which misleads most people to the real background of these so-called "WASPs," a term that was invented in the 1950s by sociologists and poltiical scientists, although sometimes the "W" in it is argued to stand for "wealthy," with the real WASPs being only the wealthier and more elite branch of this group, who arguably were long the dominant ruling elite of the US. The problem lies in the use of the term "Anglo-Saxon," which has the more specific meaning and association with the English of Great Britain. The term's specifically literal meaning is White English Protestants. But in fact only in certain parts of the US are the so-called WASPs largely of only English ancestry, especially in rural parts of New England (hence that name) as well as in the more Tidewater areas of the southeastern states, especially in Virginia. These people are more likely to be Episcopalian or Congregationalist or Quaker (or curiously Morman, with Utah probably the US state whose population is more strongly descended from the English than any other).

Most people in the US identified as being WASPs are of mixed ethnic descent. English is certainly a major part of it, but especially in the US South this descent usually includes people from Celtic fringe of Great Britain, the Scots, the Ulster or Northern Irish called the Scotch-Irish, especially in the Appalachian mountains, as well as the Welsh. My last name is Welsh, but I am descended from all these groups. And these WASPs often have other groups as well, mostly other Protestant northwestern Europeans, with the Dutch prominent in New York, the Germans in Pennsylvania, the French Huguenots in South Carolina, and the Scandinavians in the upper Midwest, as well as often some unacknowledged amounts of Native American, African-American, or others (I have both German as well as some Gypsy ancestry). And these people often adhered to religious groups not so strictly tied to the English as are the Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Quakers, and Mormons,such as Presbyterians (Scottish), Methodists (Welsh), Baptists (German), and Lutherans (German and Scandinavian).

So, the bottom line is that the real "British" are the British Americans now labelled as "WASPs." It was in America where this mixing of these groups that have not mixed so much back in Great Britain have mixed, creating that type that might have constituted a unified ethnic identity in the home country, but have not done so there. It has been in America where this mixing happened, even as the label applied to this group in the US suggests that it is mostly or only of English descent. In any case, whatever one thinks about it, the power of this group has been fading since the end of World War II.

I shall close this by simply noting that I because aware of this personally only about two decades ago, although I was intellectually aware of the fact that American WASPs, especially those in the US South (who include the lower class "rednecks"), were of this mixed English-Celtic ancestry. It was on a visit indeed to Great Britain when we went driving around, although I had done this more than once at earlier times. I kept realizing that I found myself sympathetic to and feeling a kindred with all of the people who were local to each area, even as I realized that I was not so fully sympathetic for the reason that I was not just English or Scottish or Welsh, but all of these in my ancestry. I realized that I was one of the "real" British, a British-American, somebody not found very often in Britain itself. Curiously this difference was long recognized between the British British and the British Americans, but in the earlier era, prior to World War II, this odd group that dominated in the US was simply called "Americans," although that term has now lost that meaning as it now means something like what "British" means in Great Britain, that is, somebody who is a citizen of the US whatever is their ethnic ancestry. Thus we have since identified that group with this oddly misleading term, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, which is not precisely correct in general.

Barkley Rosser

Addendum:

Another unfortunate fallout from the Brexit vote may involve the Good Friday Accords and the broader peace agreements between Ireland and UK over the status of Northern Ireland, which agreements were ultimately carried out within the framework of EU rules and regulations. This is now threatened, with the possibility of either a hard border between the two parts of Ireland reappearing or Northern Ireland leaving the UK to join the now more prosperous Republic of Ireland. Hopefully whatever happens there will not see a return to outright violence as we have seen in the not so distant past.

This shows up in the US with there recently being more attention paid to those people desended from Northern, or Ulster, Irish, known here as Scotch-Irish (or more recently Scots-Irish), alhough the westernmost county of traditional Ulster is in the Republic of Ireland rather than the UK. Anyway, among others former senator and presidential candidate, Jim Webb, has written books about them and their heritage in the US, which indeed has been heavily concentrated in the Appalachian mountains, with them having a history of being martially oriented, with such figures as the now unpopular Andrew Jackson, being a prominent president of this background. This group has been culturally important as the main source of folk and country music forms in the US, which when combined with blues and jazz with their African and German marching band music influences led to rock and roll. However, from an early period these musics had been intermixing, with hardest core instrument of country/folk music, the banjo, having been imported straight from western Africa, with almost no changes (and ironically with that instrument never used by any modern African-American musicians).

Prior to the arrival of the Catholic Irish in large numbers after the potato famine of the late 1840s, the Scotch-Irish simply called themselves "Irish," but started with this Scotch-Irish stuff so as to distinguished themselves from their Catholic co-islanders, thus making them able to join that odd mass of WASPs or "Americans." and join in with discriminating against the Catholic Irish. I note that I also have Scotch-Irish ancestry, with in fact my middle name that I go by, Barkley, being a Scotch-Irish last name, the English spellings of that name being Barclay and Berkeley.

A correction: The proper name of the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so "Great Britain" is just the island of Britain. Also, the Isle of Man and the Channel islands are not part of the UK, but bailiwicks of it.

At one level this is a trivial question with an easy answer. A British person is a citizen of Great Britain, whose more formal and official name is the United Kingdom, or UK for short. That should be the end of that, and the recent vote vote by citizens of Great Britain (I think permanent residents may also have been allowed to vote) to leave the European Union, the "e," arguably reinforced the meaningfulness of this identity, especially in regard to the broader alternative of being a "European."

But then we have this problem that this vote appears to be stirring up divisions within these British people, with the Scottish in particular having voted strongly against the majority outcome, resulting in renewed pressure to have another referendum on Scottish independence, for them to cease to be citizens of Great Britain, arguably to cease to be "British." Is this identity then much more fragile than we might think it is? This gets pushed further in that people in Northern Ireland also voted to Remain, although not by as large a margin as did the Scots, 56% rather than 62%. The Welsh went with the national majority, indeed mirroring it closely at 52%, with the English making that the national average by more strongly supporting Leave and offsetting the Remain majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland, with this even more strongly the case in more rural parts of England as London went strongly for Remain, almost as strongly as did Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland. There seem to be some pretty sharp divisions on this among the main identifiable sub-groups among the British.

This then suggests that we should take this internal division and apparent lack of agreed upon identity a bit more seriously. The word "British" comes from the word "Britain," which while often used as a short hand name for the entire nation, the United Kingdom, more specifically means the island of Britain, large island to the east of the island of Ireland. That the UK is "Great" Britain is partly because it involves more than just the people on that island, most notably the Northern Irish, as well as those on other much smaller islands such as Lewis (birthplace of Donald Trump's mother) where Scottish Gaelic is still spoken, and the Isle of Man, where the now-extinct language of Manx was spoken, related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic (and where the cats without tails come from),among some others. Thus being a British citizen includes people not living on the island of Britain.

The name "Britain" itself is quite old, going back to at least the Roman period, when those living on the island, or at least in the part of it ruled by the Romans, were known as the "Brythons." However, that proves to have involved a narrower group than those who live there now, not including the people now in Scotland who were called the "Picts" by the Romans, although they never viewed themselves as a group and identified themselves by tribal group names constituting sub-groups of themselves. That Scotland itself is sub-divided is clear in the division between the Highlands, where one is more likely to find people who can speak Gaelic, the language of people who invaded from Ireland several centuries after the Romans stopped ruling in the southern part of the island of Britain, the Romans having built Hadrian's Wall to protect the zone they ruled and full of Brythons largely to keep out the troublesome Picts, who reportedly painted themselves blue. Modern Scots are descended from ancient Pictish tribes, but also with this Irish Gaelic ancestry in the Highlands, as well as Viking ancestry, and Anglian ancestry in the Lowlands (Lowland Scottish fishermen reportedly can communicate easily with Frisian ones from the Netherlands, the Frisian language supposedly close to Old English). Yes, the Lowland Scots have serious English ancestry.

As for those original British, the "Brythons" who were ruled by the Romans, they lived in what is now England. But the language that the spoke was an ancestor to the modern Welsh language. Perhaps this is why the vote totals in Wales on Brexit so closely corresponded to the overall totals in Great Britain as a whole. However, clearly the modern Welsh are distinct from the Scottish, the Northern Irish (or "Scotch-Irish" as they are called in the US), not to mention the modern English. After all, Welsh is a Celtic language, if one more closely related to Breton spoken in northwestern France, as well as the now dead Cornish language, once spoken in Cornwall in the very southwestern most part of modern England, than to the Gaelic languages that came out of the island of Ireland. These modern Welsh are not all that closely related to the modern English, who now occupy the territory once occupied by the Roman-ruled Brythons, ancestors of the modern Welsh.

As it is, English not a Celtic language, although having many Celtic loan words in it,but mostly a Germanic one, related to modern Frisian as noted above, although also now with many loan words from Latin languages as a result of the Norman Conquest in 1066 and all that. The Germanic Anglo-Saxons (who also included the Jutes from Denmark who mostly ended up in Kent in the southeastern most part of England) invaded the island of Britain around and especially after the removal of Roman rule of what is now England and Wales, pushing the Celtic-speaking Welsh westwards into modern Wales, although also certainly killing many of them and intermarrying with some of their women to create the modern English. We indeed have some complicated migrations and wars that lie behind the identities of the main modern groups that inhabit both the island of Britain as well as the nation of Great Britain, not getting into all the groups that have arrived more recently ranging from Jews from Central Europe through Hindus from India and Muslims from Pakistan to Polish plumbers especially recently under the auspices of the European Union, from which the English in particular seem so keen on leaving, much more so than their fellow "British" in the Celtic fringe.

So we have it that the modern British are a bunch of sub-groups, ones that do not intermarry or mingle all that much, except maybe in London and a few other large cities. At some deeper level there really are not many "British" in Great Britain in the sense of people who are the descendants of fully intermarried members of these older constituent sub-groups who are very much aware of their identities, with this awareness if anything being heightened by their different attitudes towards this Brexit vote. This vote has if anything undermined what it means to be "British," even as it supposedly reinforces it. Indeed, quite a few observers are noting that this vote was really about the English asserting themselves, with those rural parts especially in the north and east often called "Little England" being the most strongly pro-Brexit parts of Great Britain of all.

While I have not seen anybody doing so, I am going to raise the question then about if there is a place where this intermingling of these different sub-groups has happened, where indeed we might find people who might represent this type that does not, or only barely does so in Great Britain itself. I think there is. It is the United States of Ameica, although also probably to a lesser degree in some of the other former English-speaking colonies of Great Britain, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South Africa. However, in the US, this is not immediately obvious, and this is partly because most of these people are certainly not called "British" or even "British-Americans," but something else. They are called WASPs, or "White Anglo_Saxon Protestants," and I am one of them by ancestry, or so a sociologist who would use this term would argue.

There is a problem, however, with this label, which misleads most people to the real background of these so-called "WASPs," a term that was invented in the 1950s by sociologists and poltiical scientists, although sometimes the "W" in it is argued to stand for "wealthy," with the real WASPs being only the wealthier and more elite branch of this group, who arguably were long the dominant ruling elite of the US. The problem lies in the use of the term "Anglo-Saxon," which has the more specific meaning and association with the English of Great Britain. The term's specifically literal meaning is White English Protestants. But in fact only in certain parts of the US are the so-called WASPs largely of only English ancestry, especially in rural parts of New England (hence that name) as well as in the more Tidewater areas of the southeastern states, especially in Virginia. These people are more likely to be Episcopalian or Congregationalist or Quaker (or curiously Morman, with Utah probably the US state whose population is more strongly descended from the English than any other).

Most people in the US identified as being WASPs are of mixed ethnic descent. English is certainly a major part of it, but especially in the US South this descent usually includes people from Celtic fringe of Great Britain, the Scots, the Ulster or Northern Irish called the Scotch-Irish, especially in the Appalachian mountains, as well as the Welsh. My last name is Welsh, but I am descended from all these groups. And these WASPs often have other groups as well, mostly other Protestant northwestern Europeans, with the Dutch prominent in New York, the Germans in Pennsylvania, the French Huguenots in South Carolina, and the Scandinavians in the upper Midwest, as well as often some unacknowledged amounts of Native American, African-American, or others (I have both German as well as some Gypsy ancestry). And these people often adhered to religious groups not so strictly tied to the English as are the Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Quakers, and Mormons,such as Presbyterians (Scottish), Methodists (Welsh), Baptists (German), and Lutherans (German and Scandinavian).

So, the bottom line is that the real "British" are the British Americans now labelled as "WASPs." It was in America where this mixing of these groups that have not mixed so much back in Great Britain have mixed, creating that type that might have constituted a unified ethnic identity in the home country, but have not done so there. It has been in America where this mixing happened, even as the label applied to this group in the US suggests that it is mostly or only of English descent. In any case, whatever one thinks about it, the power of this group has been fading since the end of World War II.

I shall close this by simply noting that I because aware of this personally only about two decades ago, although I was intellectually aware of the fact that American WASPs, especially those in the US South (who include the lower class "rednecks"), were of this mixed English-Celtic ancestry. It was on a visit indeed to Great Britain when we went driving around, although I had done this more than once at earlier times. I kept realizing that I found myself sympathetic to and feeling a kindred with all of the people who were local to each area, even as I realized that I was not so fully sympathetic for the reason that I was not just English or Scottish or Welsh, but all of these in my ancestry. I realized that I was one of the "real" British, a British-American, somebody not found very often in Britain itself. Curiously this difference was long recognized between the British British and the British Americans, but in the earlier era, prior to World War II, this odd group that dominated in the US was simply called "Americans," although that term has now lost that meaning as it now means something like what "British" means in Great Britain, that is, somebody who is a citizen of the US whatever is their ethnic ancestry. Thus we have since identified that group with this oddly misleading term, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, which is not precisely correct in general.

Saturday, June 25, 2016

The background for this tale is that I have just finished attending the 9th MDEF conference on Dynamic Modeling in Economics and Finance (actually, Modelli Dynamiche Economiche e Finanza) in Urbino, Italy. Alan Kirman was in attendance and was much frustrated (as was I) with the tendency for junior scholars from around the world to present very conventional neoclassical models, even if they were doing some interesting things with them, Cobb-Douglas production functions, aggregate, with ratex and rep agents, and the whole schmeer. When confronted, they would whimper and say that they did it so that it would be easier to get published, which I am sure is true, and in today's job market, I have sympathy. But they sure looked embarrassed and clearly mostly recognize that their models are fundamentallyflawed.

At the social dinner last night, Alan told the following tale of the dragon slayer over dessert. Some of these young scholars looked to be squirming a bit.

The dragon slayer was widely recognized as being the best in the world at his craft, for which he wandered about gaining praise and prestige. Then one day, a wise man informed him that there are no dragons. He became very depressed and soon dropped completely out of sight.

Then a few months later he reappeared, driving around in a fancy new car all dressed up spiffily and with a beautiful woman hanging all over him in the car. A friend asked him what was up. He said, "I have started a school to teach others to become dragon slayers."

Friday, June 24, 2016

"The policy framework governing the euro can be aligned with a more general theoretical framework, which finds its expression in the ‘new consensus macroeconomics’ (NCM). The essential features of that theoretical framework are as follows:

(i) politicians in particular, and the democratic process in general, cannot be trusted with economic policy formulation with a tendency to make decisions, which have stimulating short-term effects (reducing unemployment); but which are detrimental in the longer term (notably a rise in inflation). In contrast, experts in the form of central bankers are not subject to political pressures to court short-term popularity, and can take a longer-term perspective, where it is assumed that there is a conflict between the short term and the long term. Policy makers’ scope for using discretion should be curtailed and the possibility of negative spillovers from irresponsible fiscal policy must be reduced.

(ii) There is only one objective of economic policy and this is price stability. This objective can only be achieved through monetary policy, and through manipulating the rate of interest in particular.

(iii) inflation is a monetary phenomenon and can be controlled through monetary policy. The central bank sets the key policy interest rate to influence monetary conditions, which in turn through their short-run effects on aggregate demand affect the future rate of inflation. Central banks have no discernible effects on the level or growth rate of output in the long run, which is determined exclusively by aggregate supply factors like technology, capital, and labour inputs. However, central banks do determine the rate of inflation in the long run.

(iv) the level of unemployment fluctuates around a supply-side determined equilibrium rate of unemployment, generally labelled the NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment). The level of the NAIRU may be favourably affected by a ‘flexible’ labour market, but is unaffected by the level of aggregate demand or by productive capacity.

(v) fiscal policy is impotent in terms of its impact on real variables (essentially because of beliefs in the Ricardian Equivalence theorem, and ‘crowding out’ arguments), and it should be subordinate to monetary policy in controlling inflation. There is allowance for the operation of ‘automatic stabilisers’ as the actual budget surplus or deficit will fluctuate during the course of the business cycle with tax revenues rising in boom and falling in recession, and this provides some dampening of the cycle. The budget should though be set to average balance over the course of the business cycle.

"The structure of the ECB clearly conforms to all five points. The sole objective of the ECB is price stability, and decisions are made by a governing body composed of bankers and financial experts. There are, and can be, no involvement by any other interest groups or any democratic body. The only EU level policy from controlling inflation is monetary (interest rate) policy, which presumes that monetary policy is a relevant and effective instrument for the control of inflation. Inflation is in effect targeted by the ECB in the form of pursuit of ‘price stability’ interpreted as inflation between 0 and 2 per cent per annum. The third point is fully accepted and adopted by the ECB. This can clearly be confirmed by the monthly statements of the Governor of the ECB at his press conferences after the announcement of the decisions on the level of the rate of interest.

"The implementation of what is in effect a balanced budget requirement at the national level under the Stability and Growth Pact and the absence of fiscal policy at the euro area level has eliminated the use of fiscal policy as an effective instrument for the reduction of unemployment (or indeed of containing inflation pressures)."

"If, as a result of Brexit, the economy crashes it will not vindicate the economists, it will simply illustrate once more their failure." -- Ann Pettifor

You can see immigrants. You can't see NAIRU or flexible labor market policies. Most people wouldn't know a NAIRU from a Nehru jacket and have probably never heard of flexible labor market policies.

There is a simple logic behind the "growth through austerity" policies beloved by Cameron and Osborne: "wages are too damn high." But there is also a more technical-sounding obfuscation. This more convoluted explanation is that there is a long-run, "natural" rate of unemployment that is unaffected by aggregate demand, therefore fiscal stimulus will result in inflation. Thus the only non-inflationary way to reduce unemployment is to fine tune this hypothetical natural rate by removing labor market rigidities.

Another euphemism for these "flexible labor market policies" (i.e., "wages are too damn high.") is "structural reforms." In a press release from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Mark Weisbrot pointed out the connection between Brexit and these so-called structural reforms:

"While the movement in the UK to leave the EU had right-wing, anti-immigrant and xenophobic leaders, in most of Europe that is not the driving force of the massive loss of confidence in European institutions. The driving force in most of the European Union is the profound and unnecessary economic failure of Europe, and especially the Eurozone, since the world financial crisis and recession.

"It has cost European citizens millions of jobs, trillions of dollars in lost income, and is sacrificing a generation of youth at the altar of fiscal consolidation and 'structural reforms.' It has delivered an overall unemployment rate in Europe that is twice the level of the United States; more than seven years of depression in Greece; more than 20 percent unemployment in Spain, and long-term stagnation in Italy. In recent weeks French workers have been fighting against 'structural reforms' that seek to undermine employment protections and the ability of organized labor to bargain collectively."

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Last night my wife, Marina, and I watched live the debate at Wembly Arena in over Brexit, BBC, with three on each main side. The betting markets have never said Leave will win, with their lowest forecast being 58% Remain. Now, after the assassination of pro-Remain Labour MP by a neo-Nazi.the prediction markets have gone to 75% for Remain, and on Monday, the markets and the pound surged. But the 'shpolls remain near tied, with the main one on this morning's FT with Leave still ahead by one point. Looks pretty close, like a dead heat.

So what may be pushing in the Leave direction after the assassination of Jo Cox, is the debate last night, with 6000 in the live audience, and without doubt most of UK watching. Behavioral economics comes in here, particularly Danny Kahneman's peak and end point theory. What matters for memory is the peak point and the endpoint. In this, I am not sure about the peak point, but somehow the main pro leave leader, Boris Johnson, got to speak last, and he really jammed it up, declaring that tomorrow will be an "Independance Day!" for the UK. That drew the only standing ovation of the evening.

Carl Chiarella died this morning after a long illness, which had forced him to fully retire last summer from his position at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Long one of the leading figures in the Bielefeld School branch of Post Keynesian economics, he was coauthor of numerous books with people like Peter Flaschel, Willi Semmler, Reiner Franke, and numerous others. The Bielefeld School takes seriously nonlinear dynamics as well as integrating ideas from Marx, Keynes, and Schumpeter, with Carl being the leading nonlinear dynamicist in this group, having written several books and important papers in that area by himself.

He also served as a coeditor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control for several years as well as being an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization when I was its editor. In later years he wrote more on finance, including about speculative bubble dynamics in agent-based models. For many years he organized and oversaw annual conferences on quantitative finance at the UTS. He was a good guy who helped many out on many things and had a great dry wit.

The first time I met him was in 1995 when I spent a month visiting at the University of Newcastle in Australia as a guest of Bill Mitchell,which was when I also first met Steve Keen, who used to show up at some of Carl's finance conferences. I gave a talk at UTS on the invitation of Carl, who had read my 1991 book, From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities. In its first two printings, the copyright page mistook me for my late father and had my birth date as 1907 (who had died in 1989, but somehow the Library of Congress had not gotten that point; this was my first book but my old man had published seven in his life and has my name, or maybe it is that I have his, except for the "Jr." at the end). Anyway, just before Carl introduced me at the talk in his department, he said to me that he had expected me to be much older, and this was due to his having seen this erroneous birth date, which he thought was for real. His PhD was in applied math.

Conventional economic theory posits that more 'flexible' labor markets—where it is easier to hire and fire workers—facilitate matches between employers and individuals who want to work. Yet despite having among the most flexible labor markets in the OECD—with low levels of labor market regulation and employment protections, a low minimum cost of labor, and low rates of collective bargaining coverage—the United States has one of the lowest prime-age male labor force participation rates of OECD member countries.

Although it has indeed become conventional, the 'flexible' labor markets mantra is not a theory. It is dogma. An article of faith. The theory behind the nostrum of flexible labor markets is Milton Friedman's natural rate theory of unemployment, which, as Jamie Galbraith pointed out twenty years ago, was constructed by adding expectations to the empirical Philips Curve observation of a relationship between unemployment and inflation:

The Phillips curve had always been a purely empirical relation, patched into IS-LM Keynesianism to relieve that model's lack of a theory of inflation. Friedman supplied no theory for a short-run Phillips curve, yet he affirmed that such a relation would "always" exist. And Friedman's argument depends on it. If the Phillips relation fails empirically— that is, if levels of unemployment do not in fact predict the rate of inflation in the short run—then the construct of the natural rate of unemployment also loses meaning.

Galbraith's evisceration of the natural rate theory and NAIRU is incisive, persuasive and accessible. Read it.

At the other end of the flexibility spectrum, intellectually, is Layard, Nickell and Jackman's Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market. In their influential textbook, Layard et al. grafted the dubious NAIRU concept onto the archaic lump-of-labor fallacy claim to create their own chimera hybrid, the LUMP-OF-OUTPUT FALLACY.

To appreciate the pretzel logic of Layard et al., one has to first understand that the old fallacy claim is essentially an inversion of the "supply creates its own demand" nutshell known as Say's Law. Jamie's dad, John Kenneth Galbraith, had argued back in 1975 that Say's Law had "sank without trace" after Keynes had shown that interest "was not the price people were paid to save... [but] what was paid to overcome their liquidity preference" and thus a fall in interest rates might encourage cash hoarding rather than investment, resulting in a shortfall of purchasing power.

So, at one end of their graft Layard et al. were resuscitating the old canard that Keynes had supposedly "brought to an end."
At the other end of the graft was Friedman's tweaking of an atheoretical empirical observation -- the Philips Curve -- that was "patched into IS-LM Keynesianism to relieve that model's lack of a theory of inflation. (James Tobin once elegantly described the Phillips curve as a set of empirical observations in search of theory, like Pirandello characters in search of a plot.)" And let's not even get started with IS-LMist fundamentalism.

Churchill's "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" quip about the Soviet Union has nothing on Layard et al.'s antithetical and anachronistic graft on a tweak of an atheoretical patch on an unsatisfactory "attempt to reduce the General Theory to a system of equilibrium," as Joan Robinson described IS-LM "Keynesianism":

Whenever equilibrium theory is breached, economists rush like bees whose comb has been broken to patch up the damage. J. R. Hicks was one of the first, with his IS-LM, to try to reduce the General Theory to a system of equilibrium. This had a wide success and has distorted teaching for many generations of students. Hicks used to be fond of quoting a letter from Keynes which, because of its friendly tone, seemed to approve of IS-LM, but it contained a clear objection to a system that leaves out expectations of the future from the inducement to invest.

And by "expectations," Keynes clearly had in mind uncertainty, not honeycomb equilibrium.

To many people, shorter working hours and early retirement appear to be common-sense solutions for unemployment. But they are not, because they are not based on any coherent theory of what determines unemployment. The only theory behind them is the lump-of-output theory: output is a given. In this section we have shown that output is unlikely to remain constant.

This is simply FALSE. Shorter working hours is based on the same theory as full employment fiscal policy: Keynes’s theory. But don’t take my word for it. In an April 1945 letter to T.S. Eliot, Keynes wrote:

The full employment policy by means of investment is only one particular application of an intellectual theorem. You can produce the result just as well by consuming more or working less. Personally I regard the investment policy as first aid. In U.S. it almost certainly will not do the trick. Less work is the ultimate solution.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Well, well, the dear old National Rifled Assholeciation has weighed in with its theory. Assault weapons don't kill people, "political correctness" does.

"The National Rifle Association (NRA) on Tuesday defended gun rights, two days after a gunman killed 49 people and left 53 others injured at a gay nightclub in Orlando," Jesse Byrnes at The Hill reports:

"In the aftermath of this terrorist attack, President Obama and Hillary Clinton renewed calls for more gun control, including a ban on whole categories of semi-automatic firearms," Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, wrote in a USA Today op-ed.

"They are desperate to create the illusion that they’re doing something to protect us because their policies can’t and won’t keep us safe. This transparent head-fake should scare every American, because it will do nothing to prevent the next attack," he said.

Cox said "political correctness" allowed for the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history to take place, noting that the FBI had interviewed the shooter multiple times since 2013 and that he maintained a government-approved security license.

"Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s political correctness prevented anything from being done about it," Cox wrote.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who the NRA has endorsed, also attacked "political correctness" in a speech following the shooting.

So what exactly is the connection between "political correctness" and mass murder? Let's ask an expert: mass murderer Anders Breivik (the following is reposted from August 2015)

"...voters crave the anti-status-quo politician. They want results. They need a fighter. They need someone to fire all the political-correct police." -- Sarah Palin, interview with Donald Trump

Anders Breivik

In the introduction to his "compendium" manifesto, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, mass-murderer Anders Breivik asked, "What is Political Correctness?" and "How did it all begin?" His answer dwelt on the Frankfurt School, and singled out Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization as especially important. Breivik's text was copied and pasted almost verbatim from a screed called "Political Correctness: a Short History of an Ideology?" by William S. Lind, "Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation."

In turn, the "cultural Marxism" thesis of Lind's "history" can be traced to a 1992 article, "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and Political Correctness," published in a Lyndon Larouche cult magazine, Fidelio The article's author, Michael J. Minnicino, subsequently disowned his work as "hopelessly deformed by self-censorship and the desire to in some way support Mr. LaRouche's crack-brained world-view."

Along the way, "conservative" Republican stalwarts Ralph de Toledano and Patrick J. Buchanan have recycled those crack-brained conspiracy theories, documented by abundant footnotes that typically lead either to a source who didn't say what they were credited with saying, to some other hack propaganda recycler or to an "authoritative" emigre like Victor Zitta or Lazlo Pasztor relying extensively on official histories published by the Axis-allied Horthy regime. Martin Jay traced the strange trajectory of this propaganda meme in "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe."

Roger Kimball

This month saw the publication by Roger Kimball's Encounter Books (an "activity" of the Bradley Foundation) of yet another rehash of the discredited crap, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, by Michael Walsh. A credulous review of that book in the Washington Free Beacon presents the book's argument, apparently oblivious to its dubious lineage:

In The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, Walsh argues that the current obsession with politically correct speech began with a group of Marxist academics at the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, who would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. The scholars, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, among others, developed a wide-ranging, if often contradictory, critique of the principal tenets of "bourgeois" Western culture—from the centrality of reason and individuality to Christian sexual mores.

As Barkley and I have discussed, the term "politically correct" probably was popularized in the late 1960s and early 1970s by left-wing student activists wary of the self-righteous dogmatism displayed by self-styled Marxist-Leninist political grouplets. But that's not the way the conventional mythology goes.

At the end of December 1982, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed, "The Shattered Humanities" by William Bennett, who at the time was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bennett's complaint was that "matters of enduring importance" -- "the true," "the good" and "the noble" -- had been abandoned because "we have yielded to the bullying of those fascinated with the merely contemporary." By the early 1990s, Bennett's lament about the decline of traditional values in the humanities had swelled into a moral panic about the alleged tyranny of political correctness on campus, fueled by best-selling books such as Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The politics of race and sex on campus.
Even President Bush I had to get into the act with a commencement address at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in which he railed against "political extremists [who] roam the land, abusing the privilege of free speech, setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race."

Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses. The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.

Isolated anecdotes and broad generalizations can only get you so far. The elusive scourge of political correctness needed to be explained by theory of its origins. Thus the Minnicino/Larouche conspiracy theory, taken up by Lind, Buchanan, de Toledano, Breivik and now Walsh.

In spite of being called out more than two decades ago by a President of the United States, those political extremists liberals on the left have allegedly persevered in their "unrelenting demands... for increasingly preposterous levels of political correctness over the past decade." This, according to S. E. Cupp explains Donald Trumps popularity: "Trump survives -- nay, thrives! -- because he is seen as the antidote, bravely and unimpeachably standing athwart political correctness."

Meanwhile, "A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 71% of American Adults think political correctness is a problem in America today, while only 18% disagree. Ten percent (10%) are undecided."

National Survey of 1,000 American Adults
Conducted August 25-26, 2015
By Rasmussen Reports

1* Do Americans have true freedom of speech today, or do they have to be careful not to say something politically incorrect to avoid getting in trouble?

Totally out of it old white straight male that I am, I have to figure out my relationship to perspectivism. This doctrine, which many of my students fervently believe in, holds that one’s understanding of the world is determ ined largely by identity. I see the world as, well, an old white straight male, and therefore I am incapable of understanding the experience of those who are marginalized for not being old, white, straight or male. I should just shut up and listen.

First of all, the advice about shutting up and listening is pretty good most of the time. I should follow it more than I do.

As for the doctrine itself, while possessing a kernel of insight, I think it rests on three interrelated misconceptions. I would think that, wouldn’t I? Anyway, here they are:

1. Assumptions about between-group versus within-group variation in perception. To the extent that each of us has various blind spots, an important question is what are their sources and how important are they? Assume for the moment that the main claim of perspectivism is true: one’s identity does delimit what one can understand. One could then say, yes, but how consequential is this? After all, there is a lot of variation in the ability to understand at the individual level. Some people work hard at it and others just suck in the stereotypes of the moment. Within any given group there will be a range of openness to and capacity for understanding others. So the question arises, how important are identity-based differences in understanding versus individual ones? If most of the variation is at the identity group level, then we are justified in making sweeping generalizations and looking for solutions primarily by addressing group-related factors. But it may also be possible that group level factors play a minor role relative to differences across people within groups, in which case our time is better spent dealing with barriers that show up in individual thinking and behavior. From a purely speculative point of view I could see it going either way: this is an empirical question! But where is the empirical evidence? My first criticism of perspectivism is that it simply assumes its own premises, when their validity depends on the facts and may differ in different contexts.

2. Assumptions about internal versus external perspectives. What is knowledge about the circumstances of human life, and who is in a position to acquire it? Some knowledge is purely subjective: how something feels or what something means to the individual who experiences it. Other knowledge has more of an objective character, such as the social processes that cause events to occur or influence how people feel or make sense of them. There is something to be said for both: surely there are aspects of subjective experience that can’t be fully communicated to someone who hasn’t had the experience. In a society in which non-whites experience racism and whites don’t, there is a core set of experiences that non-white people, and only non-white people, have access to. At the same time, sometimes we are too close to an experience or event to understand what causes it or what alternatives to it are possible: an outsider, less captive to the moment, may have a better vantage point. This is well known at the level of individual emotion: no one really knows how I feel but me, but I need friends and sometimes relative strangers (like therapists) who can look at me from the outside and see things I can’t. The same kind of problem arises in anthropology. People in a local culture understand themselves in ways the anthropologist is likely to misunderstand (and therefore need to speak for themselves), but the foreign scholar who lives in their midst for a year or two can tell them some things about their culture they could scarcely have imagined on their own. Both perspectives are not only valid, but necessary. What perspectivism seems to say, however, is that only the first is valid, while the second is counterfeit and even an instrument of oppression.

3. A theory of belief versus a theory of truth. Perspectivism is very close to the classical theory of ideology. Marx’s view was that one’s class position strongly influences how one interprets the social world, and in recent decades we’ve come to understand that it’s not just about class. Ideological processes can be seen in any division or stratification of society—in gender, nationality, age, physical ability, sexual orientation, anything. Contra the claim in the previous paragraph, there is no true “outside” perspective, since all of us are inside some social position or set of experiences. To put it another way, there are relative outside vantage points but no absolute outside position. It’s all impure.

But ideology is a theory of belief, not truth. It’s a theory of why a person in a given social circumstance is more likely to believe one thing rather than another, not what belief is more likely to be true. The criteria for truth have never changed, and they never will: it’s all about reasoning and evidence. (These criteria have been refined over the centuries, but they can still be summed up as reasoning and evidence.) As an old white straight male I am more likely to believe some things than others because of my social position, but that has no bearing on whether what I believe is more or less justified. Or it might in a statistical sense, but you won’t know it aside from the criteria derived from reasoning and evidence whose validity is separate from and above all ideological divisions.

Yes, I realize some peope have ideologies that cause them to reject what I’ve just proposed as unarguable criteria for validity. No, I can’t argue with them, because my arguments are based on reasoning and evidence, so they only work with people who accept these criteria. Most perspectivists, I suspect, are unwilling to go that far—but then they have to distinguish between factors that influence the likelihood of belief, which absolutely include the identities they center on, and those that govern the likelihood of truth, which don’t.

As an old white straight male I believe lots of stuff because of my relationship to the world around me. Whether that brings me closer to or further from a valid understanding, or both in various respects, can be determined only by applying the criteria for validity that are the same whatever identities you are slotted into.

Monday, June 13, 2016

There’s a review in the New York Times of a new book about the radical times of 1969-70 that devotes a lot of space to recollections of the Weather Underground. The usual suspects are interviewed, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd. There is some contrition, some bombast.

But listen to this quote from the review by Jon Wiener:

Reading these interviews, it’s not hard to understand what you might call the Weatherman temptation. S.D.S. had held the first antiwar march on Washington in 1965, but four years later the war was bigger than ever. Over those four years, Bill Ayers says, “we had tried everything that we could think of: organizing, knocking on doors, mass demonstrations, getting arrested, militant nonviolent resistance.” None of it worked to end the war — and the Weathermen understood why, as one of its leaders, Mark Rudd, explained: Ordinary Americans, especially white workers, were morons — except that’s not the word he used.

And this is the part that really, really got me at the time and gets me still. Many, maybe most, of the Weather honchos came from upper income, corporate families. They grew up thinking workers were stupid, and when they became “revolutionaries” they still thought this, although now they had new reasons. The apple doesn’t fall very far, does it?

Those of us who came from less exalted stock and still dreamed of a majoritarian, radical movement were simply plowed under. The media, transfixed by glamor and violence, ignored us, and before long we had become invisible even to ourselves.

Incidentally, in the mid-70s I had occasion to look at my (heavily redacted) FBI files. In it was a claim that I had harbored a Weather fugitive earlier in the decade. I can remember how upset it made me that I had been targeted on the basis of a supposed act that I never would have committed, since I regarded the Weather folk, pound for pound, to be more reactionary in their political effect than the most violent cop in riot gear.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

I was delighted to receive a cordial and thoughtful reply from Omar al-Ubaydli to my open-letter blog post to him about his "counterpoint" piece on shorter working time and unemployment. The purpose of this post is both to reply to Omar and to recap and contextualize the exchange to make it accessible to the general reader.

A few days ago, I was writing a blog post about the significance of the "first use" of the expression, "lump o' labour" in an 1843 novel by John Mills. Mills's use of the expression would appear to faithfully reflect what its common meaning and context of usage would have been to ordinary working people in the mid-19th century -- at least there is no reason to suspect otherwise. That meaning would have been concrete and definite: the expenditure of just so much effort to perform a given task. The context would have been the idea of a appropriate, proportionate compensation for the amount of effort expended.

A glaring red flag is how simple the proposed solution seems to be: Proponents of work-sharing believe an economy requires a fixed amount of work to be performed by a limited number of people. High unemployment, they contend, is due to allocating too many hours to current employees. A more equitable redistribution of work hours, according to this logic, may diminish unemployment: Instead of Alex and Chris working 45 hours a week and Jo being out of a job, each can work 30 hours, eliminating unemployment.

...

In contrast with an elementary work-sharing analyses, the real world reveals that there isn’t a fixed amount of work to be done. The total demand for labor depends upon how it’s restricted or divided.

Much of the discourse about robots -- and, before that, about automation or machinery -- has revolved around the question of the amount of work that will be left for people to do. This is asking the wrong question. But it is the question they want you to ask.

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions," Thomas Pynchon warned in Gravity's Rainbow, "they don’t have to worry about answers." In this case, the question they don't want to worry about answering has to do with proportions, not quantities.

Friday, June 10, 2016

That is the purging from the most public place his political views. This has happened at the Picasso Museum in Paris as a result of its renovation, with its reopening in 2014 after several years removing any hint of Picasso's political views. As it was, he joined the French Communist Party in 1944 and remained a member until his death in 1973 at the age of 92, although there is evidence his enthusiasm waned somewhat after 1968. NevHe admired them for their resistance to the Nazis and also because of their position in the Spanish Civil War. And at the end of WW II, they were the largest political party in France, even if today their support is in the neighborhood of 2% or less.

The sign of this shift is the disappearance of his 1951 "Massacre in Korea" from display in the museum, a protest against US actions in Korea modeled on a famous painting by Goya. Prior to the renovation, it was the culmination of a visit to the museum, the last thing one saw as one went through the museum, and an obvious indication of his political views. It is now not to be seen, nor is there any other overtly political painting or sculpture in the museum, much less any mention of his political views on any of what one reads on the walls as one goes through. Picasso's political views have been purged from the museum. Instead there is now a massive amount of his sculpture, almost more than there are paintings, much of this not well known and also very impressive.

Of course there was always a problem regarding Picasso and the Communist Party, a great big contradiction. They, or at least the Soviets, hated his modern art, which they considered to be bourgeois western decadence. Picasso was fully aware of this, but it never seemed to bother him. He even painted Stalin in a way he thought complimentary, but the Soviets hated it. I do not know where this painting is. And he was also quite wealthy in his older age and very much involved with selling his painting to wealthy capitalists and all that. But that Picasso had this contradiction, this is no longer to be seen or known in the museum where the greatest amount of his art work is located. Whatever one thinks of his views, something has been lost.

Addendum: Let me relate this to the current situation in France, where indeed the Communist Party may be making its last stand as a power in French society and economy. As many of you may know, the Socialist government of Hollande has proposed a labor "reform" removing many rights of workers that is supposed to raise employment. The more leftist labor group, the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), closely linked to the French Communist Party is strongly opposing this and has been engaging in strikes, and is calling for a general strike in a few days. It is not being supported by the more conservative Confederation Francaise Democratique du Travail (CFDT). While CGT union members are only 2 and 1/2 percent of the French labor force, a percentage about matching support for the Communist Party, they are in some crucial sectors, especially transportation, so if they all go out on strike, they can really shut the nation down, and the European soccer tournament has just started. Despite their low membership, many in France are sympathetic. This is a big showdown, but if they lose, they may go the way of people recognizing Picasso's membership in the French Communist Party.